The executives spent most of the meeting touting the evolving market, namely how their newfound allegiance to digital learning materials—rather than old-school physical textbooks—would place them at the forefront of the new wave of education technology.
3 comments:
I have some pretty complex feeling on digital textbooks and digital learning in general. As a self-identifying "tech-savvy" person, I enjoy looking for and reading about cool new technology. That being said, I don't know if I can get behind the "digital textbook/digital learning" revolution. Like the author states, there is something valuable about working with and learning from a physical copy of something. Digital textbooks are obviously more convenient, and the incentive for publishers to move students towards the "digital revolution" is clear, but I am not sold on the idea that students are completely on board. There is proven research that taking notes by hand is superior to taking notes on the computer. I think digital learning is definitely an area that could benefit from further study. I think ultimately "blended learning", or some other hybrid model, is what is here to stay in the foreseeable future. There are undeniable perks to digitizing part of one's education, but there are also certain traditional methodologies that are proven to be highly successful.
This was actually something that I was thinking a lot about this past weekend. I am starting a new course this mini that requires me to purchase three text books. I went on amazon like every other college student does to purchase their text books. I was ready to buy the iPad version of the books because they are significantly cheaper (in print the one coasted fifty dollars, but on the iPad it was only five….seem like a great deal to me) and I wouldn’t have to carry them around in my backpack are two of the many reasons I was going to go through with this. However, I did not go through with this for one reason. This is that the page numbers would not match up with that of the hard copy, making it hard to flip to a specific page during class. If this can be figured out than I truly believe that text books will become extinct.
In modern times textbooks are becoming a thing of the past. Not everyone learns from a textbook. It is only geared toward one specific group of people because everyone has different learning styles. What I found to be most surprising is that people who are dry content textbook learners are a minority yet today in most school systems that is the primary way of teaching. The biggest disappointment with textbooks is that the learning is very one sided. The knowledge is given to the reader and they can either accept it or fight in every way to accept it because based on how its presented it is very confusing. Today interactive learning is so much better because you can learn in real time weather or not you are grasping the concept. Best part is if you are not there are thousands of videos and explanatory games that can help you.
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